Waymo Trial Delayed Again With Sharp Words for Uber From Judge

He also claimed that the team used a secretive messaging system on an anonymous server that would delete texts nearly immediately in order "to ensure we didn't create a paper trail that came back to haunt the company in any potential civil or criminal litigation". "You're making the impression that this is a total cover-up". Uber fired Jacobs in April.

"Uber has been waiting for its day in court for quite some time now", Uber said in a statement to Bloomberg. Under questioning by Uber lawyers, he described the importance of using secure communications for legitimate reasons, including ensuring the safety of workers overseas.

Both the US Attorney's letter and Jacobs written testimony, as well as related filings from Uber and Alphabet-owned Waymo - which claims its trade secrets were stolen by Uber - have been heavily redacted [PDF] to the point where it is impossible to divine any details.

Richard Jacobs, who worked for a now-disbanded corporate surveillance team at Uber, told the judge that stealing trade secrets was part of his former colleagues' mission, along with monitoring information on metrics and incentives for drivers who operate on competitor platforms overseas. Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who left Waymo to spearhead Uber's self-driving auto unit, allegedly stole thousands of confidential documents on his way out the door, but Uber has maintained that those documents never reached its corporate servers. "(Uber law firm) Morrison & Foerster and rest of the Uber lawyers withheld evidence, (despite) a direct order to produce stuff like that". Levandowski has declined to answer questions about the allegations, citing constitutional protections against self-incrimination. Rescheduled to begin next week, the trial has again been postponed after information and other bombshell allegations that Uber withheld have surfaced.

Waymo said that it had learned about the letter last week from the Department of Justice, according to MSNBC.

The ride-hailing service is the most valuable private US company, but its aggressive expansion has been dogged by scandals. Governments across the globe have launched investigations into the incident.

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